Abstract

Since the 1970s, the Regressive Imagery Dictionary (RID) has been widely used as a content analysis tool for both psychological and literary research on texts. Today, besides the original English version, it exists in translations for seven other languages. However, the wide-ranging validation studies conducted on the English version have mostly not been replicated for the various translations, hence the validity of these translations must rest for the time being on their concurrent validity with the English original. This article examines the concurrent validity of the German, Latin, and Portuguese translations of the RID. Taking the English RID as a de facto standard, it uses translations of the psalms (N = 150) to check how far the three translations of the RID correspond to the English original in identifying whether there is a significant dominance of primary or secondary process lexis in a text. Overall, compared against the English version, the Latin translation has 77.33% accuracy, the German translation 68%, and the Portuguese translation 56.67%. In terms of the sensitivity and specificity of classification, the Latin translation performs quite well on both measures; in contrast, the German translation is conservative, whilst the Portuguese translation is liberal.